Congressional overseers have long lamented that the Defense Department had no accurate accounting for the number of contractors on the battlefield. Unlamented, however, is the fact that the department fails to accurately account for the number of contractors killed or injured in the line of duty supporting those who are protecting our nation.
But perhaps that is because the facts represent an inconvenient truth, as procurement law expert Steven Schooner and Collin Swan report in this quarter’s edition of Service Contractor. In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractors accounted for 53 percent of all fatalities in both Iraq and Afghanistan, they found.
Schooner and Swan report that, in 2003, contractor deaths were only 4 percent of the total casualties reported. By 2007 that proportion rose to 27 percent. Overall, contractor fatalities account for one-quarter of reported deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan since combat operations began in 2001. Two recent estimates suggest that private security personnel working for DoD in Iraq and Afghanistan were nearly five times more likely to be killed than uniformed military personnel, a fact that some in Congress or watchdogs fail to cite when they slander contractor employees as money-hungry “mercenaries” and “privateers.”
What’s more, Schooner and Swan found that the number of contractor deaths may be underreported because the government lacks any means of fully tracking the number of non-federal civilians supporting the government who were killed or injured in the combat zone.
Where contractors are an increasingly integral part of the total force and military operations plans, it becomes more important that they’re both counted and accounted for in the same way as the military and federal personnel. But Schooner and Swan put it better when they wrote:
"In a representative democracy, an honest, accurate tally is important for the public and the nation’s elected leaders to understand the true human toll of these conflicts. Transparency in this regard is critical to any discussion of the costs and benefits of our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. An accurate accounting is also important for the public – and Congress – to grasp both the level of the military’s reliance on contractors and the extent of these contractors’ sacrifices.”
